Nancynall on Mystery Meat

Sometimes I get pointed to an article on another blog that is so good I can’t pass it up. This story from the terrific Nancynall.com, takes a look at the New York Times piece earlier this month, on flaws in the government beef Inspection process. If you haven’t read the -long- Times piece, this is a great synopsis.

Here’s the prob­lem: Into every mod­ern Amer­i­can life, some processed food must fall. We might try might­ily to hew to the straight, nar­row, organic and local, but sooner or later you’re going to be served a restau­rant meal that doesn’t draw its raw mate­ri­als from the Niman Ranch, or your child is going to have to eat the school lunch for one rea­son or another, or you just aren’t going to have the energy to burn a cord of wood to make a cou­ple of eggs (as Anthony Bour­dain amus­ingly summed up Alice Waters’ break­fast for Les­ley Stahl on “60 Min­utes.”). And god­damnit, but it is the government’s job to make sure food-processing facil­i­ties are as safe as can be, and are pro­duc­ing meat that doesn’t have to be han­dled like toxic waste. (If I hear one more indus­try dip­shit telling me I need to clean my cut­ting boards with bleach, I’m going to throw one at their heads.) We’ve clearly seen — sorry, lib­er­tar­i­ans — that “mar­ket forces” aren’t going to shape up the var­i­ous factory-food indus­tries alone, at least not until we have a plague of par­a­lyzed 22-year-olds, or some­thing. The USDA comes across almost as badly as Cargill and the vast Omaha beef proces­sors who put this poi­son into Amer­i­can super­mar­kets. Seizure, forced shut­downs, and a few cor­po­rate exec­u­tives doing a perp walk in hand­cuffs — that’s what it’s going to take. (Although, based on what we’ve seen, or not seen, on Wall Street in the past year, I’m not hold­ing my breath.)